We’ve strayed from the ideal of libraries as community temples of learning.
We’ve strayed from the ideal of libraries as community temples of learning.
Y ou’ve been reading a variant of this story for some time: A tiny three-book library in the remote Idaho hamlet of Yorrick faced cutbacks in 2025, threatening service to the four people who live there. “It’s not the worst that could happen,” said one resident at the time, “since we’ve all read the books a few times over, but the library was a place where we could all meet up, or would, if it wasn’t just a box under Gertrude’s porch.” But thanks to a grant from a little-known government agency without which life somehow would cease to be worth living, the town’s library not only got its budget restored, but enough money for two more books in 2027.
Now this agency, the National Fund for Sending Money All Over the Place, faces “chilling” ideological strictures from an administration seemingly bent on enforcing its ideas on the grant recipients.
The latest version is this story about “chilling” rules placed on the Institute of Museum and Library Services:
A library in rural Alaska needed help providing free Wi-Fi and getting kids to read. A children’s museum in Washington wanted to expand its Little Science Lab. And a World War I museum in Missouri had a raft of historic documents it needed to digitize. They received funding from a little-known federal agency before the Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to dismantle it last year.
It was blocked by a judge, who no doubt cited an 1851 Supreme Court decision mandating Alaskan Wi-Fi.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is now accepting applications for its 2026 grant cycle. But this time, it has unusually specific criteria. In cover letters accompanying the applications, the institute said it “particularly welcomes” projects that align with President Donald Trump’s vision for America.
What, all the pages of the graphic-novel sex books have to be gilt-edged?
These would include those that foster an appreciation for the country “through uplifting and positive narratives,” the agency writes. . . . The agency also points to an executive order calling for the end of “the anti-Christian weaponization of government” and one titled Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again.
The solicitation marks a stark departure for the agency, whose guidelines were previously apolitical and focused on merit.
Oh, no doubt. If there’s anything that modern libraries are known for, it’s their strict apolitical nature and dedication to the canon over trendy social issues. But the new guidelines are so chilling that Goebbels himself would ask someone to toss a log on the fire.
Or are they? Read for yourself.
Of course, there have been lawsuits about the attempts to defund the agency, and of course they assert that cuts to the agency will negatively impact rural communities, as if there’s some shoeless Cletus standing outside a shuttered building where he’d hoped t’ git a copy of that there Tale of Two Cities ’cause he’d only been to one in his life and was keen to hear ’bout t’ other.
That said, libraries are necessary community boons and deserve to thrive. I have fond memories of the Carnegie Library in Fargo, N.D. Andrew Carnegie gave thousands of small towns a tidy temple of learning and cultural transmission, but really, the proper-thinking moderns should regard him with contempt. He was a billionaire (boo), the books were tainted by a Western perspective (hiss), and the design was the sort of classicism favored by the current administration’s design decrees for federal architecture. All those phallic patriarchal columns — tsk, tsk.
Nothing replaces the communal role of a good library run by patient matrons who know when to deliver an authoritative shush, but the modern equivalent to a Carnegie might be a Starlink receiver. Why not spend the money on those? No, better to confiscate all of Elon’s cash and fund the featureless building with the table of “banned books” prominently displayed, staffed by blue-haired librarians who hide the Harry Potter books because J. K. Rowling speaks wrongthink on X.